Sermons tagged with Children

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. This morning, as we were getting ready for the service, I looked at the chairs and I went, it's the summer months, crowds are going to start to dwindle. I don't want people to show up in the room to feel cavernous. So I took a chair off of the end of each row. Yeah. And then I was talking with Shane and Phil, who've been here longer than me. And they said, hey, next week, maybe leave all the chairs in there. And I said, yeah, I'm going to consult with you two before making any more rash decisions about this. So I'm as surprised as you are that it's crowded here. And my standard joke is if you had a hard time finding a parking space, or if you had to make your own, you know what time it starts. So that doesn't feel like it's my problem. Welcome to Grace. Several years ago, I was at my previous church. And at that church I served essentially as an associate pastor, but one of my roles was to serve as the family pastor. Hang on, this is driving me nuts. I was not the IT guy, just the family pastor. One of my roles was to serve as a family pastor and in a larger church staff, it was a larger church at the time, the family pastor oversees the children's ministry and the student ministry and the people who run those ministries. So in that capacity, I had a guy that worked for me named Alan. He was a youth pastor. And Alan, it was getting to be the summertime, and we told him that he could hire some interns for that summer. And one of the guys he hired was a kid named Aaron. And I don't really know. Aaron was young, in his early 20s. I don't really know how he found the church. I think he just kind of started coming and volunteered and wanted to get involved in the youth ministry program. And Alan wanted to hire him as an intern. And so I heard that he got hired. And so I kind of went and met Aaron. And he was one of these guys that just immediately upon meeting him, I thought to myself, I don't like this dude. I like this guy. I don't like him. I don't like the way he chooses to present himself to the world. I like the way he looks. I like the way he talks. I'm not going to describe any of those things, lest I offend some of you. But the biggest thing I didn't like about this guy that rubbed me the wrong way was that everything he did, everything he did, he may as well have worn a t-shirt every day that said, please like me. And he was one of these people that had gotten involved in youth ministry because in my estimation, he had never been around people that liked him a lot. And he thought, well, then I'll shoot fish in a barrel. I can win middle schoolers over and get them to like me. So it was like he was in ministry as his own personal ego project to make himself feel better about himself. So he wanted to be cool. He was never cool. So I'll go into youth ministry so kids will like me and I'll feel cool. And I'll be honest with you. I've been at this a while. It takes one to know one. Early on, I had to repent of that same attitude of I just want to be respected and I want people to like me. And I think a dirty little secret of being in professional ministry and all I did is go pro with my faith. Okay. That's all I did. We're all supposed to be ministering. We're all supposed to be Jesus's ambassadors. I just decided I'm going to take my talents to the professional level and get paid for this. Okay. But everybody's supposed to do the same thing. And a lot of the people who get into ministry early on, it's an ego project. I want to feel important and respected, and God sanctifies that and massages that out of us. So hopefully we can minister out of a gentle and contrite spirit and a humble heart and genuinely want to usher people towards Jesus and towards his kingdom. But what I sensed in this guy, Aaron, was that he was off the charts, look at me, like me guy. And I thought it was gross and I didn't like it. And I went to Alan and I said, dude, I said, I like that guy. It doesn't need to be around youth ministry. Nothing nefarious was going on. I didn't suspect anything nefarious. I just suspected that his motives for ministering were wrong. And I didn't want that around our ministry. That's not why we get involved in what we're doing. I was like, I don't like him, not comfortable with him. You need to get rid of him. And he kept defending him, but all summer long, he was just one of these guys that immediately when I met him, I didn't like him. And it makes me wonder if when I start talking about people that you just don't like, if any of you can think of somebody right now that you just don't like. And I would ask you, besides the older gentleman that greets at the front door, Ron Torrance, that's mine that I'm thinking of right now. So y'all aren't allowed to pick Ron, you have to pick somebody else. I think everybody in this room has somebody they can think of when I say, who's somebody that you just don't like? And now maybe immediately our minds will go to celebrities or people that we've never met, but we've seen in different medias and we just don't like them. I'm not talking about them this morning, although that is an ancillary application of this. I'm talking about people in your life that you know that you don't like. Now, some of us are like Kyle. This morning, I asked Kyle for some sermon research before the service. Hey, man, can you think of anybody that you just don't like? And he was like, I'm sure if you gave me a minute, I could come up with somebody, but no. And then there's other people I talked to this morning were out of nowhere. I was like, hey, don't you know so-and-so? And he says, he's a good buddy of mine, and he says to me, yeah, I do know him. You would not like this guy. I can't stand him. So there's people on different, and I said, you're going to like the sermon this morning, dude. There's people on different ends of the spectrum, but no matter where you sit on that spectrum, we can all think of people that we've met in our life that we don't particularly care for. Sometimes very justified, sometimes small, silly reasons. I don't like their attitude, whatever it is. I don't like the cut of their jib. Whatever it might be, we have people that we don't like. And because that's a reality of life, because the reality of life is from time to time, we will meet people, we will be surrounded with people, we will be in close contact with people that we don't particularly care for. A co-worker from time to time, our spouse, our parents can rub us the wrong way sometimes, our children can rub us the wrong way sometimes. But there are people, those people we kind of bring back into the fold because we need to, but there's some people that we will just write off. Like, I just don't like that person. Don't want to deal with that person. A neighbor that is your mortal enemy, whatever might be going on in your life, we have those people that we simply don't care for. And a question that has come up often in my life as a Christian is kind of this theoretical question, is it okay as a Christian to not like someone? Is that all right? And so that's really the opening question of the day. There will be some people you simply don't like, but is that okay? There will be some people that you simply don't like, but is that, as a Christian, is that okay? Now this comes in the middle of a series, or This is actually the last part of the series called In Light Of. We've been going through Romans since February. We went through the first eight chapters, which meticulously build a case for humanity's need for Jesus. And then there's the culmination of those chapters in Romans 8, where we do need Jesus very much, and then promises are made to us that nothing can ever separate us from his love. And in light of this wonderful truth that Jesus accepts us, loves for us, paved a way for us to spend eternity in relationship with Almighty God, how should we then live our lives? So every week we've been looking at a different chapter in Romans 9 through now 15. In light of that truth, how should we live our lives? And so this week we come to Romans 15, and I believe it asks this question, or at least it answers this question, one that we deal with from time to time. As Christians, is it okay for us to have people that we simply don't like? Now, if you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, thank you so much for being here. And I have good news for you. I'm not preaching to you this morning. If you're not a believer this morning, you are free to not like whoever you want. You do not have to hold yourself to the standards of this. But if you're a Christian, that may not be our answer. So to that question and to the unavoidable reality that from time to time there are people in our life that we simply don't like, is this okay? Are we allowed to do that? Paul writes this, Romans 15, verses 5 through 7. May God, who gives endurance and encouragement, give you the same attitude of mind towards each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 7. Accept one another then, just as like people? And sometimes it's for very justifiable reasons. But as we approach Scripture and say, is it ever okay for a Christian to simply not like someone? This is the instruction. Accept others as Christ accepted you. What does he say in verse 5? He wants to give you the same attitude of mind towards each other as Christ has towards you. So in two different ways, when we ask the question, is it okay to have people in my life I simply don't like? And I want to be very clear here. Obviously, obviously, we're not asking the question, can I be openly mean to them? I don't like them. Therefore, I feel like it's my right to ridicule them and belittle them in the workplace until they quit in shame. We're not preaching against that. I'm going to assume you know that. If you don't know that, there's a great fourth and fifth grade class right over there that might be on your level. Obviously, we know it's not good to ridicule people, to treat them poorly because we simply don't like them. Hopefully, we are of an elevated morality and sense of character that even when we don't prefer somebody, even when we don't like somebody, we find it within the magnanimity of our generous character and spirit to be nice to them from time to time. We have probably executed that. That's how we get around in society, is we learn to at least be cordial to people, even if we don't prefer them. And we tend to think as Christians that this is an okay model. As long as I'm not a jerk, then I'm fine. But that's not what Romans says. What Romans says is we should have the same mind towards others that Jesus has towards us. That we should accept others as Jesus accepts us. Which is different than if you just don't like somebody, try to be nice to them. No, no, no. We should think of them as Jesus thinks of us. So let me ask you this. How do you think Jesus accepts others? Do you think that Jesus is in heaven? And when some cranky old lady dies, he looks at Paul and he's like, Paul, I can't think of a name that's not offensive right now. So I'll choose one that is. Karen just died. Paul, you're welcome. Thank you for being the foil for that joke. Paul, look at this. Karen just died. And both Jesus and Paul go, oh, geez, this is going to be a handful in heaven. Do you think there are people that pass away that Jesus is like, I was really hoping that they wouldn't accept me because they were going to be Satan's problem. And now there's eternity with this person. I'm going to talk my ear off. Do you think Jesus does this? Don't you think he likes people? Don't you think he likes you? Do you think that when you get to heaven, you'll be like, Jesus, man, that I could be. I've already given the example of Aaron, and we're going to come back to that story and redeem it a little bit. But you think I'm going to get to heaven and be like, Jesus, like, for real, dude. Aaron, he was the worst, right? And you think Jesus is going to be like, I know, thanks for bearing that burden for me, brother. No, no, obviously Jesus likes everybody. And some of my Bible scholars in the room may go, well, hang on, he didn't seem to like the Pharisees very much. And I'll give you that. He was stern with the Pharisees. But we also see a Jesus that when one of them came to him in John chapter 3 named Nicodemus and wanted to talk with him and ask him more questions, and he asked to meet Jesus at night. Why? So that his Pharisee peers wouldn't see him meeting with Jesus and so bring shame upon his good name. He wanted to meet with Jesus in secret, and Jesus knew that. And what did he do? He didn't say, no, I don't care for you. I don't like your kind. You want to talk to me? You talk to me in the middle of the day in front of everybody. No. He said, all right, let's talk. And he had an open, honest, generous conversation with Nicodemus. Well, he didn't seem to like the Pharisees very much. Okay, well, he was stern with them from time to time. But do you not think that Jesus wanted to see them in his kingdom? Do you not think that Jesus knew who they were inside and out and wanted to see them come to faith and use the influence that they had been given to usher other people into that faith? Do you not think he saw the best in them and wanted the best for them? I think it's a really, really difficult argument to make that Jesus simply doesn't care for some people. That Jesus has an attitude towards people of, you know, I really don't like them very much, but I'm going to be nice to them if they're around. I'm going to try to think positively of them, which should really inform the question for us, am I allowed to simply not like someone? Well, all I know is that we're instructed in Scripture to have the same mind towards others that Jesus has towards them. And we're told to accept people as Jesus accepts them. So let me bring this more personal, if we're still having a difficult time with the concept, and ask you this question. How did and does Christ accept you? This is a really important question. Because you're here this morning, it's a Sunday, most of you woke up and showered, you put on decent clothes, you're presenting yourself. This is an environment in which it is imminently easy to be liked. All you have to do is shake the hands of people who look at you. If someone says good morning, you say good morning back. If someone says, how are you doing? You say, good, I hope you are, or good, how are you doing? It's really easy to put on the facade. Just be nice to everybody, you'll leave likable. It's harder with the people you see every day. It's harder at home. And it's harder for the people who know you the best to like you the most. That's why we love to be fully seen and to be fully known. To be fully seen by your spouse and to be fully known by them is this great picture of love, to really know your kids and know what they're capable of and understand all the ugliness in them and go sweep it aside and love them deeply anyways. And for people to offer you that is exceptional love. And it is very rare for someone to know us deeply and yet still like us. That's what makes friends and spouses so deeply important and meaningful in our life. But even those people who know us the best don't know us completely. They don't know every racist thought we've ever had. They don't know every pretension that we hold. They don't know every time we look down on someone else and so elevate ourselves. They don't know what we really think of that person that posts that thing on Facebook. Even the people who know us the best don't know everything that's happening in us all the time. And the reality is that for most of us, we think and feel pretty confident that if they did, they would not still like us. Jesus knows all of those things. And Jesus likes you, accepts you completely. He knows what's worst about you. He's been with you through the Holy Spirit. His presence has been brought into your lowest moment where no one else was and that you never talk about. And Jesus is excited for you to come to heaven with him. He likes you. So I would ask you again, those people in our lives that we don't like, we're told by Scripture to accept them as Christ accepted us. So how did and does Jesus accept you? And I love thinking about this. Jesus accepted you when you accepted him, knowing everything that you would be and become after that, the good and the bad. And he still likes you. He still wants you around. So that's how we are supposed to accept other people. This is difficult, right? And I know that some of us might go extreme with this. Do you mean that Jesus really likes the terrorists from 9-11, Nate? He really likes them? I believe that Jesus loves them. I believe that Jesus was hurt deeply for them. I believe that Jesus saw impressionable young men that were deceived by evil and led to believe things that were fundamentally untrue to a place where their life was defined by hate, which is the exact opposite of what Jesus wanted for them. So I believe that he grieved for them, that he did love them. Many of us in our life have people who have hurt us deeply. Nate, it's easy for you to say that I'm not allowed to not like somebody, but you don't know what my dad did to me. You don't know what my mom was like. You don't know what my ex-husband did. You don't know what my ex-wife did. You don't know how awful my brother was growing up. You don't know that. I have a right to my disdain. I have a right to my dislike. You probably do. You probably do. All I can tell you is that Paul prays that we will learn to accept them as Christ accepts us. All I can tell you is that Paul tells us that we should have the same mind towards them that Jesus has towards us. Now here's, and I want to say this before I move on. I believe those extreme examples are the exception, not the rule. I believe when I asked you to think of somebody in your life that maybe you just don't care for, that for most of you, that answer was not from some place of deep wounding and hurt. For most of you, it was an answer similar to me. I didn't like this guy. He just rubbed me the wrong way. I never did prefer him. But for both examples, how do we find a path towards that generosity and magnanimity of spirit where we can actually find a way to like people that we don't like? Well, I would like to invite you to learn to ask what I think is a very important question. What are their actions telling me they really need? When I see someone acting in a way that I don't like, what are their actions telling me they really need? When I was looking at Aaron and I immediately decided I didn't like him, not Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, I still don't like him, but Aaron from the example, the youth intern. And I immediately, I decided I didn't like him. Why did I not like him? I didn't like him because he was trying to get approval from kids and that's not where you should get approval, man. That's not the reason to get in here. So you need to get your fragile ego out of here. I didn't like him because he wanted approval and acceptance. Because he wanted to feel like he was enough. He had never felt before in his life like he was enough. And he didn't, And here's the thing. Everybody wants that. Everybody in this room wants that. Everybody in this room might as well tattoo across their chest or across their forehead, am I enough? We all wonder that. So how could I not like somebody for asking the same question that I do? It's just that some of us figure out how to get that question answered in more socially acceptable ways than he did. But if I would have stopped and just said, what do his actions tell me that he needs and wants? I would have very quickly arrived at, Aaron just wants to be enough. And that's not really something worth condemning him for. Maybe I should show him instead of withhold from him. I've seen clips going around recently about people losing their minds in public places. Groups of people losing their minds in restaurants, yelling at waiters, yelling at owners, throwing things in Chipotle, yada, yada, yada. And it's easy to watch that and be like, those people are completely unlikable. And that's the most mild way I can summarize my thoughts in that moment. We have every right to disdain them and their behavior. But if you ask this question, what do their actions show me that they need or want? What their actions show me is that they want to feel respected. They want to feel like they have some sense of control. They want to feel like their needs are valued like everyone else's. And for whatever reason, something's happened in their life to make them think that nobody cares about them. And so rather than sit back and quietly take it, they're going to be vocal about demanding it. Who among us does not want to feel in control from time to time? Who among us doesn't want to be respected? Who among us is happy with taking a backseat to everyone else if that's the paradigm that we feel like we live with? And so when we ask this question, what do their actions tell me that they need? It gets us to this place of empathy and understanding, which kind of paves the way to liking them. And so I want to ask you this question. What would happen if we chose empathy over disdain? What would happen if we chose empathy over disdain? If when we see somebody that, and we go, I don't like them. I don't like people who vote that way. I don't like people who post that way. I don't like people that agree with that, that are of this political party. I don't like people who whine about this or carry on about this. I don't like high maintenance people. I don't like low maintenance people. I don't like tough people. I don't like weak people. Whatever it might be, the people that we don't like. Stop when we feel ourselves not liking someone. I want you to test this out. For some of you, it's going to happen very quickly. You're going to be leaving the aisle and the person in front of you is going to be going slow and you're going to feel rage well up within you. Why are they moving so slowly? Pause. What are their actions tell me that they need? Time, you jerk. That's what they need. They're old and they need time. And you will be too one day and you will need time. So relax. Next time you feel yourself tempted to not like someone and give in to that, pause. What do their actions tell me that they need? And is what they need really that condemnable? With the people that have hurt us deeply, what do their actions tell me that they need? Some of us, I'm sure, and I don't want to speak too lightly about it, but what we know from research and experience, some people grew up with a dad that was violent. What do those actions show you that he needs? He probably needed a good dad too. He probably didn't have that either. He probably needs to be understood. He probably needs somebody to love him enough to sit him down and say, hey man, this is not the way you should be, but he's never had anybody who loved him enough to say something. I'm not trying to excuse away abusive behavior at all. I'm just saying that there is a way to begin a path towards empathy by asking ourselves, what do their actions tell me that they need? And then beginning to understand what motivates the bad behavior, not defining them by the bad behavior. At the end of Aaron's tenure, he finished being an intern, and he wanted to come on as a youth assistant in a full-time capacity. And I wasn't going to let that happen. And so he asked to meet with me to know why we chose not to hire him. And I told my youth pastor to take the meeting. I didn't want to do anything. No, I'm just messing around. I took the meeting. And leading up to that meeting, I thought to myself, you know, I have to love him enough to tell him the truth. I have to respect him enough as a human to tell him the truth. And we met and he said, why can't I move forward at this church? And I said, and I told him, I said, man, here's what I think. I think that you need to take a break from youth ministry because I don't, I don't think that you're really happy with yourself. And I think that you're in this to try to gain the respect of others, but getting the respect of some students is really not going to make you feel okay about yourself. So I think that you need to get involved in a small group of your peers. You need to let God speak to you. You need to pause and consider whether youth ministry is really the career that you need to take or if you're just doing this for selfish reasons. And once you've reconciled with those things, I think you should move forward with whatever path God gives you. But right now, I think you're trying to get into ministry for the wrong reasons and you're going to end up crashing and burning. And he thanked me. And he went on and he, honestly, he followed my advice. He did what I told him I thought he should do. He took some time off, got involved in another church, met a nice girl, decided ultimately to go back to school to get a Bible degree and to get into ministry. But he called me years later and he said, I just want to thank you for that conversation because you were right. And God did have some work to do on me. Now here's what's really important. That story works out like I'm the hero, but I never tell those stories because I'm not. Here's where I failed him because I let my dislike get in the way. I could have had that conversation with him in May. And I could have been a part of helping rehabilitate him, helping him grow through that. And in September, he didn't have to experience the rejection that I imposed on him because I refused to love him enough to tell him the truth about himself. And because I was a coward, and because I didn't love him enough, I was happy to just sit and dislike instead of asking myself, what do his actions tell me that he needs? And then acting according to that empathy rather than disdain. I withheld from him. And the other way I withheld from him, and this is awful, nobody needs my approval. Nobody cares what I think about them. I'm not here to claim that. But if you just think about the dynamic, here's a young 20-something kid, he's 21 years old. I'm at the time 36 or 36. No, I was 34 or 35. And I had, by all measures, accomplished what he wanted to do with his career. I was what he wanted to be. Now, that's just a position. It's not me personally. It's just the position. We understand the dynamics of someone early in their career, seeing someone that's progressed in their career going, I want to learn from that person. Meaning because of my position, realizing that all he wanted was to be told that he's enough, I could have gone to him and I could have said early on, hey dude, Jesus loves you. You are enough. I think you're going to be great. Here's your challenges to what greatness could look like. Here's where your character may be getting in the way of what God wants to do with you. But I believe that if you're willing to be open about that and move on from them, that God can do some powerful things with you. So you stick by me and we're going to tackle this together. How much better does that look than just simply choosing to not like him for justifiable reasons for the five months that he was in my care? What does choosing to not like him win me? What did I prove to him? What did I prove to myself? What benefit is it to us to have people that we've simply reconciled to ourselves? We're not going to like them. None. But here's the benefit if we do. I'm skipping two points in your notes if you're following along. The last thing is the result. Verse 7, complaining about. The result of refusing to dislike someone, even when it's justifiable, but offering them grace and searching for empathy instead and seeking to understand what their actions tell us that they need and loving them for what motivates them, not judging them for their behaviors. The result of that is that people bring praise to God. The result of that, if we can practice that here, is to create an environment where everyone feels loved and everyone feels accepted and everyone feels like they're part of the church and everyone feels like they're welcome here and everyone wants to be a part of what they are. And because they're so accepted here, they will accept other people. The result of that is not just about grace. It's about the kingdom and the community of God. What if God's children would quit seeing it as an option to simply not like people because we can and we don't want to? But what if the kingdom of God took upon itself to see people with grace and with empathy and to understand what lies behind the behaviors and to love the person that has the same motives we do, to like, to be loved, to be known, to be respected, to be cared for? What if we began to see people for that and how we were instead of seeing them as the world was and looking for reasons and excuses to disdain them? How much more attractive and fragrant would our faith be? How much more praise would be brought to God if we would simply quit letting ourselves dislike people for reasons that ultimately don't matter and start making ourselves ask for God's empathy, for God's acceptance of them, for Jesus's mind towards other people that Jesus has towards other people. What if we started becoming people like that? What if the kingdom of God started offering empathy like that? How much more praise would be brought to the God that we all serve? So let's stop not liking people. Let's knock it off. Let's find paths to empathy so that we can accept everyone with the same mind that Jesus does. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for these seniors that have graduated and are moving into a new phase of life. God, I pray specifically that you would be with each of their moms as they worry here for the next several months, probably in a continued way. Give them your peace of spirit as their children go and step into these new phases. Lord, I pray that we would be a people who like folks the way you do. That we would find paths to empathy and understanding so that we might think the best of them. So that we might love them well as you do. God, where there are roadblocks to this, where there's difficulty there, where we just have a person that we just can't get around to liking, I pray that you would help us begin to break down those walls and show them your love and your acceptance and your grace and your goodness. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm making grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for joining us in that way. We are beginning our new series, or we're continuing in our new series, called You'll Be Glad You Did. And the idea is to take the wisdom of Proverbs, proverbial wisdom, written by King Solomon, who the Bible claims is the wisest man who ever lived, and to look at some of his wisdom and say here at the top of the year, if we confront ourselves with it, if we listen to it, I bet, I bet that by the end of the year, you'll finish 2026 being glad that you listened to the wisdom of Solomon here at the top of the year. You guys will have to forgive me. We've got a small contingent of Bills fans in the church, and they're all sitting in the front row with, I even forget the name of those pants, but there's a particular, what's the name of those kinds of pants, do you know? Zubas, yes, that look like zebra stripes, and then Susie's got on the best fan shoes I've ever seen in my life, so I just need to say that out loud before I can continue as if there's nothing happening right in front of me. But we're looking at this proverbial wisdom, and one of the reasons I wanted to do it, and one of the reasons I wanted to spend a month looking at the wisdom of Proverbs is because one of the best things I've ever done is to take very seriously reading the book of Proverbs. You've heard me say, hopefully multiple times, that the greatest habit anyone in their life can develop is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. And I still believe that to be true. And there was a season where for three years, every day, I read a Proverb dated as just read a chapter. It's a great place to start. And if you want to read your Bible and you don't know where to start, you don't know how, that's where I would encourage you to begin. If you are someone who reads your Bible, I will tell you that most days for three years, I read whatever proverb was commensurate with that date, that day, and then read whatever else from the Bible I wanted to read that day. And those were some of the richest three years of my life. I immensely enjoyed it and never got tired of reading those Proverbs. So that's a good place to start. And if you hear nothing else from me today of any value, but you leave here and you go read Proverbs every day for the next year, I promise you, you'll be glad you did. This morning, we're going to look, did you like that, Tom? This morning, we're going to look at a proverb about generosity. And I said this in the Gracevine this week. I send it out. And if you're here and you don't get the Gracevine, you don't know what that is, and you would like to receive it, just please fill out a connection card or email me, and we'll get you on that distribution list. But I said in the Grace Find this week that we were going to be talking about a proverb on generosity. And those of you who are my church friends and church people, you know that generosity is pastor code for give us some money. Generosity is code for I'm going to preach a sermon compelling you to give to the church because we need to get some stuff done. And I want to ally that fear this week. Maybe that's why it seems a little bit more thin this week than last week is because I sent that email out. Those of you who have been here for a long time can attest to this. I've never preached a sermon trying to get you to give to grace, nor do I think that the New Testament teaches that you need to give 10% to your local church. I don't even think the New Testament teaches you need to give 10%. I think it just is a good marker based on something that happened in Genesis with Melchizedek and Abraham that we'll talk about later. But I don't even think the New Testament teaches you that. So you'll never hear me preach a sermon trying to compel you to give to grace. So that's not what we're doing this morning. But what you will hear me do, hopefully, repeatedly, is preach sermons on generosity. And the sermon on generosity would make particular sense this morning as it relates to the strategies and desires of grace, because you guys are well aware, we just had a big push towards this building campaign, and we're're hitting go and we're going to try to be in there by the end of next year. So that's particularly relevant to our church. But that's not what I'm preaching about this morning. I can tell you that next week one of our elders, David McWilliams, who's faithfully operating the camera back there, is going to give us an update. We had end of the year giving. We have some very good, exciting news to share. He's going to give us an update. We just want another week to get all of our numbers together so that what we present to you will be the most accurate thing possible. We don't want to talk in what ifs and hypotheticals. We want to talk in precision. So David's going to do that next week. By the way, David has been serving with Jim Adams for a year now as elders, and we still have yet to bring them up here and pray over them because I'm not good at planning things like that. Also, just while we're here, Wes and Doug served for six years, and I was supposed to bring them up here and pray for them too. I've not done that yet either. So Wes, David, Doug, Jim, sorry. But as we think about generosity this morning, I think this proverb allows us to frame it up in a very robust, encompassing way so we can think about the idea of generosity from a more holistic view. So let's look at Proverbs chapter 11, verse 25, which simply says this, a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. I don't think that we think about generosity the way that Solomon frames it up here. First of all, he says, a generous person prospers. And we should be careful there because we're tempted to kind of fall into a health and wealth gospel that says, the more that I give, the more that will be given back to me monetarily. The more money I give away, the more God will bless my bank account. And that's really terrible teaching, and it ends up making poor people poorer. So that's not what we want to do. So we have to understand what prosper is. And we have to open ourselves up to maybe it means more than just prospering financially. And one of the ways that we prosper is what follows. He who refreshes people will be refreshed. The people who refresh others will be refreshed themselves. I think that opens us up to what prosperity there actually is. But I like this verse because it doesn't tell us how to be generous. It just tells us to be generous. And that the more you give to other people, the more you refresh others, the more you restore the souls of others, the more you look out for others, the more you care for others, the more your soul will be refreshed. And I think that's a really helpful and valuable way to think about generosity. And the truth of it is, God has always wanted his children to be characterized by generosity. God has always wanted his children to be characterized by generosity. All the way back at the beginning of the Bible, beginning in Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, where the laws are meted out for the ancient Israelites, for the ancient Hebrew people. God is very diligent and fastidious about making sure that his children are generous people. He says, care for the widows and the orphans and the aliens and the sojourners, which means care for those who can't care for themselves. Care for the widows because they have no way to make money and no one's paying for them. They need your help. Care for the orphans because they have no way to take care of themselves. Take care of them. Take care of the sojourners, the aliens, the people who are foreign, who are coming to your country from other places. We should always have a heart for them and their plight. So take care of them. And God gets so specific as to give this law in multiple places in the books of Moses. When you harvest your fields, leave the corners there, healthy, ready to be picked. For who? For the widows and the orphans and the aliens and the sojourners. Leave that there so that they can wean from your crop. That ethic, that ethos is there from God at the very beginning of the Bible. And then we see again, Abraham meets the king of Salem, a mysterious figure, the most fascinating figure in the Bible to me, Melchizedek. And he, upon meeting him, gives Melchizedek 10% of everything that he has. And this 10% law becomes called the tithe, and it gets written into Jewish law, Hebrew law, which we inherit in the New Testament. And it was so extensive that they gave, those who were being as righteous as possible, would give 10% of everything that they owned. They would literally empty the pantry and give 10% of the cream of mushroom soup can that they had and give 10% of the spices. They would give 10% of everything. That's how important it was to God to write it into law to do in that way that his people would be generous. Then we get into the New Testament and we see Jesus teach generosity over and over and over again. And listen, almost every time it's taught, it's taught to be generous in order to care for the have-nots. It's almost always taught as don't tithe to be obedient, don't tithe to be blessed, but give what you have to give to take care of the people who don't have something to give. This is the story of the widow's mite, where the rich man gives a bunch and the widow gives all she has, and it's two pennies. And Jesus says she just gave more than he did to the kingdom of God. We cannot argue with the idea that our God has always wanted his children to be characterized by generosity. With that in mind, I would like for us to consider how we can be generous. We're going to swallow the frog and do the obvious one first. We can be generous with our finances. We can be generous with our finances. This is the obvious one, and this is where our brain goes when we think about generosity. And so I'd like to talk about this, but then spend the rest of our time on other ways to be generous. But I was listening to a book recently, and some of you guys like to judge people for listening and not reading, because you're stuck up. And it was by an author named Scott Galloway, who is, it's difficult to define what he does. He sits on boards, he runs companies, he's a professor of economics at NYU, and he's someone that I find interesting and thoughtful. And he wrote a book called Notes on Being a Man, and that's something I've thought about a lot is I've got a son named John who's four and a half. And I don't know why the half matters. He's four. I'm a grown up. And then I have a daughter named Lily who's going to turn 10 here in a week. And I think a lot about what is it that I want to teach to John that I don't want to teach to Lily? What is it that Jen, my wife, should teach to Lily that she doesn't teach to John? And I don't have a good answer for that. And I would invite this, if any of you have answers for that, I want that discourse. Particularly if you're a little bit longer in the tooth than me. Then I really want to hear that. If you're shorter in the tooth, maybe just relax. But he wrote a book, Thoughts on Being a Man, and I would, the only criticism I have, I'm not recommending it to you. There's cuss words, so as a pastor, I cannot recommend it. But the only critique I have is I really think it would better be titled Thoughts on Being a Human. Because the things that he was espousing in there didn't feel to me like things that only men should think about. I think women should think about these things too. And Scott is a devout atheist. He has respect for people of faith, but he's not a person of faith himself, and he's open about that. But in his book, and he's become, by any stretch of the world's measure, very successful, all right? He's in his mid-50s, really successful dude, flying on private jets when he goes places, that kind of thing, all right? But here's what he said, and this is what I thought was interesting that I wanted to share with you. He said when he started his career, it was all about accruing for himself. It was all about what he wanted to get. It was all about getting rich and getting more for himself and just build, build, build, build, build. But that one day, once he felt like he had enough, there was this seismic shift in his mindset. And he became a lot more interested in being a generous person than being an accumulator. He realized it made him feel good. This is wild. It made him feel good to buy dinner. In his words, it made him feel like more of a man. In my words, I would say it made you feel like more of a grown-up. But the way that he phrased it was, it made me feel like more of a man to buy dinner for my friends, to take my friends on trips that I could afford and let them come. It made me feel like more of a man to give things away. And again, I'm not trying to be over-masculine here. I think it really makes us feel like more of a responsible human. But he said that there was this shift, and after that shift that he made this decision, that he made it his goal to give away more money every year than he spent. Not more money than he made, but give away more money than he spent on himself. And he said, in doing this, it makes me feel better about myself and about who I am. Makes me feel like a better human. This, to me, and if Scott were here, he might push back on this, but this, to me, is an atheist nodding towards the way his creator inclined him to be. What he was saying in his book was, when I refresh others, I am refreshed. And I realized it made me feel better to give away my resources than it did to accrue them for myself and my own selfish ends. And my challenge or my thought to the church this morning, because this is a room of largely church people, is if an atheist can stumble upon the simple joy of generosity and find in his own experience that he is refreshed by refreshing others, then can't we as Christians learn from that lesson and be people who seek to be generous? I told you the story a few weeks ago of the former student that I have, a kid named Alex. He's not a kid anymore. He's in his 30s. He graduated in 2010, and he and I haven't had a ton of contact since then, but I've always thought very highly of him and been glad that he's been in my life and that I had the opportunity to be in his. And he had a tough story and ended up not going to college. He had to watch his brothers when he was 19 years old. But he found a way and he became a general contractor. And some of you know the story, but just by way of refreshing, he reached out to me a month or two ago, and he just said, hey, I'm making good money now. That's not what he said, but that's pretty much what he said. I'm making good money now. I want to be generous. I want to give. I want to honor God the way that he's blessed me. I want to bless others. What can I do? And he, to answer that question, drove. He had a job in Charlotte. He lives in Atlanta. So he drove the day before the extra two and a half, three hours from Charlotte to Raleigh, met me, took me to Sullivan's where I got a bone-in filet, which is really great. And then we met in my office and I said, hey man, here's six nonprofits that I know of whose founders I know very well, who I trust and love. Let me just tell you what they do and you tell me where, and then you just do whatever you want. I don't need to know, but then you can kind of figure out where your heart's led, which ones of these capture you, yeah? And that conversation led to him having breakfast the next day with the founder of one of the non-profits and then giving that founder the largest single donation they've had in the history of that non-profit. That's cool, isn't it? Now listen, Alex also told me in that conversation, in our discourse about wanting to be generous, that out of this desire to simply be generous, he had a job in downtown Atlanta. They were building a building or they were refurbishing one or whatever. There was a job with a fence and the things and all the stuff. And he would go there every day. And he said on his way there, he would go to the ATM and get out cash. And keep it in his truck. Because there was homeless people surrounding this job site. And he would make sure to go around and give money to every homeless person that was there. Because he felt like he had the opportunity to do that and he wanted to do it. Now here's where our brain goes. Okay? And here's where mine went. Dude, that's not wise. There's a better way. I love your heart. There's a better way to give money than to do that. And that's why he and I were having the conversation. Let's think about a wise way to do it so we can make sure that that money's going to God's kingdom. We can make sure that's an effective expenditure. But here's why I tell you this story this morning. It's to say that what I truly believe, and this is just my opinion, you may disagree. What I truly believe is the spirit of generosity that led him to give in both situations, whether it's a large donation to a responsible nonprofit or smaller multiple donations that we really don't have any control over, in God's eyes are the same. Because it's not about what we give. And I don't even think, and I'm careful when I say this, because I do think we need to give to God's kingdom. But it's not about what we give, and I'm not always convinced it's about where we give. It's about the fact that we just give. So we should be generous financially, whatever that looks like for us. We should also, I believe, be generous with our time. This is not a way we think about generosity, but it is a way we think about our days. And the story that I will share about being generous with our time is actually critical of me, which is what I would prefer. I'd much prefer a story where I look bad than to tell you a story where I'm the hero. So I'll tell you a story where I look bad. In November, we went home for Thanksgiving, and I needed to preach that upcoming Sunday. My dad is a CPA. He has his own firm, and he was going into the office on Tuesday morning, and I said, hey, dad, can I come into the office with you? Excuse me. I said, can I come into the office with you on Tuesday? I need to write a sermon. I've got a couple things to do, and I'd like to get that done and be done with it so I can just focus on family this week. He said, sure. So we rode to the office together. And on the way to the office, I'm thinking about, and I think some of us can relate, I've got a lot of work to do. I have a very important task to write a sermon for 145 people to listen to. This is the most important thing happening in the whole world. Thank you for the laughter over there. That was what was intended. But that's where my head's at. I have to get this done. I have to do this. And there was some other things I needed to do. So I was really focused and I was in what we call in my family task mode. Like I'm not interacting, engaging. I'm just trying to get stuff done. And so we get to the office and we're walking in and dad stops. There's a car pulling in and he stops and he says, oh, that's so-and-so. And he kind of steps back. Like he's going to wait on so-and-so to get out of her car and come see us. And this is where, if you'd like to be disappointed in me as your pastor, this is a great place to start. I looked at dad and I said, what difference does it make? And he went, okay. And we went inside. Because my thought was, dad, this is just practical brain, okay, I'm sorry. Practical brain. I'm never going to talk to this lady again in my life. I don't know who she is. She only knows who I am because I'm your son. I don't want to talk to her. I have a job to do. I need to get done quick because my wife has the kids with her mother-in-law out on the town. And she'd really like me there as a buffer, frankly. She'd like me to be there. I need to go. So I need to get this done as soon as I can. I need to get in the car. I need to drive to Monroe and go to some stupid store I don't care about so that I can hang out with my family. That's what I need to do. That's the pressure that I feel. So when dad says that so-and-so, I think, who cares? What's it matter? And so he's like, okay. So we go inside. My sister works for dad and she had brought us Chick-fil-A biscuits that morning, which are the worst of all the biscuits. And they really are. They're the worst. And she has the Chick-fil-A biscuits, but I am grateful it's free biscuit, fine. And I said, Dad, where can I work? What conference room or cubicle are you going to tuck me into? And he says, well, you know, you can, one of those down there. He goes, but don't you want to eat first? And I said, again, practical brain. No, Dad, I'm visiting you for three days, all right? I don't need to have breakfast right now. I'm going to go eat the biscuit while I write the sermon and get my important work done. And so I said, no, Dad, I'd really just like to get to work. He's like, okay. So I go get to work, and I write the sermon. I text Jen. I'm done. Where are you guys at? I go to the thing, and we do the things. And then, this is why I'm telling you the story, that evening, Dad snaps at me about something that was pretty innocuous. And those of you who, I have a good relationship with my parents, but Dad and I can get on each other's nerves. And those of you, Kristen's nodding her head as she sits next to her dad. All right, perfect. Let's just unpack this right now, Sartoriuses. If you have grown kids, you know you can get on their nerves. If you still are fortunate enough to have your parents, they know how to get on your nerves, you know how to get on them. We got on each other's nerves. And I thought it was silly. And I finally, I didn't snap, but I just kind of said, I don't know what you want me to do. You know, we were talking about whatever. And I just, like, I needed to go. So I stepped away. And I came back after a calming down period of 72 hours. And it was like 15 minutes later, I said, hey, Dad, I'm sorry. That's not how I want to handle that, but here's what's upsetting me. And he said, I understand. And we started talking. And here's what I learned, and this is why I'm sharing this story. He said, son, essentially, you matter a lot to me. I talk to you a lot. I talk about you a lot to my employees. And it would have meant a lot to me for you to have taken the time to have met them and to be gracious with them. But you were too self-important and you couldn't. And that's why I'm upset. And I went. What a lesson. What a lesson. I don't like saying this, particularly on a permanent record. But he was right, and I was wrong. I was so focused on my tasks and what I needed to get done that I couldn't see the value in investing my time in people. And so I missed a chance. How much better would my afternoon have gone if I would have simply been generous with my time and honored my dad? How much more refreshed could I have been by taking the time to meet the different people that he wanted me to meet. How arrogant of me to think that I have nothing to benefit from small talking and exchanging pleasantries and shaking hands and learning names. What, honestly, what a jerk. And so it was a lesson. Be generous with your time. How many of us have opportunities throughout the week when someone imposes on our time and we have a task or we have a thing that we want to do, but this coworker has texted us, this coworker has popped in, this person has emailed us, this person has called us, this friend needs us. It might be dinner time, but they don't normally call at this time, so what are they calling about? How often do we have opportunities to be generous with our time that we miss for whatever reason? Maybe your reason isn't task-oriented self-importance like me, but maybe it's something else, but how often do we have the opportunities to be generous with our time that we miss because we don't think of those times as opportunities for generosity. We just think about them as impositions on our schedule and on our tasks. I'm reminded as I think of this, every time I read through the Gospels, I am amazed at Jesus' generosity with His time. Those of you who have read through the Gospels, can you recall the amounts of times that Jesus finishes an arduous day or week of ministry? Does the Sermon on the Mount, heals people, speaks to people, casts out demons, teaches, combats with the rabbis, and then once that's done, it says Jesus went off to a quiet place to pray. He went off to be by himself and to rest and recruit. And here's what stuns me is how many times in the gospels it says after finishing a day like that or an event like that, Jesus goes off to pray by himself and on his way to do that, someone says, Rabbi, can I talk to you? Will you talk to my mom? Will you come meet my son? They need you. And Jesus always, sure, what do you need? Yes, I would love to. Yes, let me talk to you. Yes, let me pray to you. Jesus is the greatest example of someone who is generous with his time. And I think, I suspect, that we can probably all be more generous with ours. The last idea about generosity I want us to consider is that we can be generous with our spirit. We can be generous with our spirit. We can be generous with our disposition towards others, with our assessment towards them, with the benefit of the doubt we are willing to give them. I had a friend in college named Paul Honeycutt. Paul Honeycutt and I, we played on the soccer team together and we did the landscape crew together. We were in charge of keeping the grounds of Toccoa Falls College pristine and we did great. It was a fun job. I got to do the zero turn mowers and the weed eaters every day and I loved it. And Honeycutt was this really interesting guy because Honeycutt was cool. Everybody liked Honeycutt. Everybody did. He had all the friends in the world. And at this stage in life, try to remember, you know, I've been in high school and now college and cool people are cool. Cool people, they make friends easily. They make friends well. And they tend to be a little bit exclusionary in the way they move through the world. If you're not as cool as them, they're not going to give you their time. They're not going to be as nice to you. It can get to be exclusive, right? And so that was my experience of cool people. And Paul was cool. Everybody liked Paul. But Paul was unique in that he was kind to everyone. We ran in the same circle, and I watched some people try to get into the circle, and other guys in the circle would kind of hold them in arm's length. I don't know if you're going to cut the mustard. I don't know if I like the cut of your jib. What a great phrase that is. But I don't know. So they kind of hold them away. But Paul was always the first person to welcome them in and to make them feel like a part of things and to be a good host and to be a generous person with his spirit. And I remember asking him one time, this is now 25 years ago, I think, and I still remember the conversation. I asked him something to the effect of, Paul, you're so nice to everybody all the time. How are you this nice to everyone? And Paul said this simple phrase to me, and I'll never forget it. He said, Nate, if they're cool to Jesus, they're cool to me. Isn't that great? If they're cool to Jesus, thanks Jeff. If they're cool to Jesus, they're cool to me. If Jesus likes them, I do too. And here's the problem for us Christians. Jesus likes everybody. How inconvenient is that? I don't know. I've thought about this over the years and I'm not going to make any declarative or definitive statements this morning. I really don't know how much space there is for us to choose to not like somebody. I don't know how much space there is for that. I don't know how much space there is for us to just hold a grudge against somebody. I don't know how much space there is to think the worst of somebody and write them off. Now listen, I want to be very careful. I'm not asking us to trust everyone and to make ourselves vulnerable to everyone and to return to painful relationships when they've burned us in the past and it's hurt so much. I'm not asking you to be unwise. Scripture says that we should be as innocent as doves and as shrewd as vipers, and I think that that absolutely applies. But what I am saying is, I'm not sure how much space we have to just choose to not like someone and write them off. If they're cool to Jesus, they're cool to me. And unfortunately, Jesus likes everybody. So I think maybe you don't have something to learn from my buddy Honeycutt, but I still do. And here's where I would say this too, and I say this carefully. Our country is very divided right now. We know that. By simply saying that statement, everybody in this room just tensed up about 25%. Here's my estimation of part of that division. Is that we are not generous in spirit towards the people who don't vote like us. And what I've noticed is our tendency is to think and assume the worst of them. But what if we would be more generous in spirit and assume the best of them? Not just politically. People who think differently than us. People who don't share the values that we do. People who don't root for the bills. What if we started to view generosity as being a way to assume the best of others, to believe the best of others, and to give them the benefit of the doubt whenever we could? Let me tell you what would happen. Not just on a church level, but on a personal level. It is refreshing to refresh others. This series is called You'll Be Glad You Did. If you will listen to the wisdom that Solomon wrote down, you'll be glad you did. This week, we have an opportunity to consider what kind of people we are in regards to generosity. And my main point is, how refreshing would it be to spend this year being more generous with your resources, with your time, with your spirit, with your demeanor towards other people. And here's what I would challenge you with. If you think about these things, and there's other ways to be generous as well, but if you'll just think about these things. How can I this year be generous with my finances? How can I this year be generous with my time? How can I this year be generous with my spirit towards others? I highly doubt you'll finish the year and think, I wish I'd have kept more of it for myself. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this church body, for this family. Thank you for the love that we share and the community that we have. God, all of us in this room have been given resources. From your fullness, we have received grace upon grace in different ways. And I pray, God, that you would increase our heart and increase our desire to be people who are characterized by generosity. May we be people who are happy to give, who are happy to refresh others, and in so doing find that you refresh us as we do. Give us the eyes to see and the ears to hear opportunities for generosity. And give us the willingness to step into those. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on Labor Day Sunday. Thank you for joining us. If you're watching online, must be nice. Maybe next year I can live stream from your place. But for those of us here, I hope we're having a good Sunday morning. This is the last part in our series in Moses that we've been going through all summer long. And so I believe that this is the 13th installment. It's 12th or 13th. So thank you for hanging in here with the life of Moses. And I hope that it's been rewarding for you and encouraging to you to go through that life and see how much we have to learn from this miraculous man and figure in the Bible. This morning, as I was trying to decide where are we going to land the plan on the series, where are we going to focus, I thought it most appropriate to focus on the death of Moses, because Moses has, I was going to say pretty unique death, but it is a unique death in Scripture and in history, I believe. And so I thought it would be appropriate to focus on that. Not only because that's where the story ends as we end our series, but I've always found the story of Moses' death to be one of the more puzzling stories in the Bible. It's one that it took years for me to wrap my head around and felt like I even understood God's actions in it. Because I think that there's some stories in the Bible where the actions of God perplex us a little bit. What we know about God, or more often than not presume about God, would lead us to believe that what he did is out of step with his character. It's out of step with who he says he is. We can't make sense of it. And because we can't make sense of it, we kind of think, well, maybe, maybe God got this one wrong. And I think that this is one of those instances. So before the death of Moses, Moses is punished. God tells him that because you did this thing, I'm going to punish you. And we see this punishment being levied in Deuteronomy chapter 32. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Deuteronomy. And I would tell you to go ahead and turn to Deuteronomy chapter 35, because we're going to cover almost that entire chapter before we're done here today. But in Deuteronomy chapter 32, we find this, and I'm going to read you a lot of verses, more didn't stumble over any of those names, so I am very happy. Second, more importantly, here's the context for what God has said. So, God says, you and Aaron sinned against me in a river, in a particular land a few years ago. Because you did that, you will not enter the promised land. And so here's the offense. You can find this offense in Numbers chapter 20, verses 1 through 13, if you're interested. The offense is they have been moving through the desert for, at this point, plus 30 years. 35 years, I don't know. They were in the desert for 40 total years, and this is towards the end of the journey. And the Hebrew people had this very familiar, consistent refrain and grumble, which was when things got hard, when food got scarce, when they couldn't find water, they would cry out and they would say, Moses, why did you bring us to the desert to die? We were better off as slaves in Egypt. We were better there. And they were upset that they had been freed from their oppressive masters to come and wander in freedom in the desert because now desert life is hard. And Moses, frankly, got tired of it, as anybody would, as any leader would, with people coming and complaining to you all the time about everything. And so he went to God. They came and grumbled to him. And so he went to God. He says, your people are thirsty. Can you provide water? And God says, yes, go to the rock in this river and speak to it or go to the rock in this place and speak to it and water will flow from it. And so Moses says, okay, got it. And he walks out and he gathers the people, the assembly around this rock and he chews them out and they deserve to be chewed out. You whiny little babies. God always provides. He's going to provide again. Here, look. And he hits the rock with his staff twice. Because the last time he brought water from a rock on behalf of God, that's how he did it. He hit the rock with his staff. But this time God told him to speak and he didn't. But in anger and frustration, he hit it twice and water flew forth from the rock and the people were satisfied. But God pulled him aside and Aaron after that. And he said, because of your impertinence, because of your sin against me, because you struck the rock and you did not speak to the rock as I instructed you, you stole some holiness from me. You impugned my holiness and my dignity. And because you did that, I will not allow you to reach the promised land. And just so we're clear on what kind of punishment that is for Moses, Moses is, according to Scripture, probably about 110 to 115 years old right now. He got called out of being a shepherd at the age of 80 and told to go lead God's people. He performed miracles. He led the plagues. He confronted the Pharaoh. God used him to destroy the Egyptian army. He performed miracles in the desert. He set up something to heal from snake bites that we didn't even get to in this series. He went on top of a mountain and met the very face of God, so much so that he shone for three days afterwards. He was the one charged with bringing the tablets down the mountain, with issuing the law to the people. The first five books of the Bible are the books of Moses forevermore. He had been a faithful servant and everything in him was journeying to the fulfillment of his life, which is going to be to enter the land that was promised to his forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he was going to get to be the one that did it, and he was going to finally get to set feet on this land that he had never seen in his whole life, and it's what he lived for as he served God. One day, I will be on the promised land. And God says, because you hit that rock two times instead of speak to it, you can't do that, which feels unfair. Does it not? The punishment feels like it very much outweighs the crime. And I hate it when that happens. I feel bad for anyone when that happens. And when I was a senior in high school, it happened to me. I was in class one day, Jen, I'm very sorry for this story. I was in class one day, and I had a friend, she was sitting a couple desks over, and I just got a wild hair that it would be funny to write her a little note and see if I could make her laugh in this class where we had a really strict teacher and you weren't allowed to do that. So I was trying to mess with her. And so I wrote her a note and in the note, I proposed to her that maybe after school, we'll meet at my car and we'll engage in teenage activities. Not married people activities, okay? It wasn't crass. Teenage people activities. Now, important to the story is I went to a very strict Christian school. That was not a lot. And it worked. She laughed. And then we laughed about it later. Well, fast forward six weeks. Some stupid eighth grade kid finds the note and reads it and is so deeply concerned in their conscience about it that they hand it to a teacher. The teacher confronts me. and she says, I don't know what to do about this. This could get you in big trouble. And I said, I can't tell you what to do with it, but it was a joke. I won't do it anymore. And she's like, okay. The next day, I get called into my principal's office, which happens to be my soccer coach. And he calls me in, and he says, Nathan, because I was Nathan at the time. By the way, my name became Nate instead of Nathan when I began to work at Macaroni Grill at the age of 19, and I had to write it on the table, and it's just shorter to write Nate. That's the only story there is for that. So he says, Nathan, I saw this note. It's completely unacceptable. And listen to me. I wish I still had it. I would let any of you read it. And you would think, this is funny. You would not think a teenage person deserves to be punished for this. But he was like, I don't know what to do with it. And I'm like, well, what's the normal punishment? He says, well, I need to suspend you. And I was like, oh, that's a bigger deal than I thought. And at my school, if you got suspended, you couldn't participate in athletics for three weeks. Well, I was the captain of the soccer team, and we were about to enter into the state playoffs. We won the state championship last year. We were probably favored to win it this year. And I was Allstate, okay? I was good. But being Allstate in that league is like being the best toy on the island of misfit toys, okay? I was never good. Sometime post high school, thinking I was good at soccer, we played a team that gave away scholarships and they were actually good at soccer. And I was oh I'm not athletic so not bragging I'm just saying in the moment this is how this is how big it was for me this was my moment right and he suspended me and I didn't get to play in the playoffs my senior season and it always felt incredibly unfair and to me that's what this punishment feels like from God. And if you're watching closely, yes, I am comparing myself to Moses. That's what this punishment feels like from God. And in my case, in my case, one of the things that helps me reconcile that is first of all, it really wasn't my principal that suspended me. It was my dad. Because my principal called my dad and made me read the note to my dad. And then my dad said, what would you do if he wasn't on the soccer team? And my principal says, I'd suspend him. And my dad said, suspend him. And he kind of hung up the phone. But one of the things that helps me reconcile that is knowing that there's probably a dozen other things that I did that deserve suspension that I did not get caught for. So it kind of worked out in the wash. But for Moses, that's not the case. This is what is said about Moses. In Deuteronomy 35, these are the last words, these are the last verses of Deuteronomy. These are the last verses of the books of history. I believe every Christian or faithful person who's lived since then who looks at the story of Moses, if Moses were to make an appeal and say, God, can you let me off with a warning for the whole rock hitting thing? Can we maybe look over that one and still let me put my toes in the sand of the promised land? Can maybe we still do that? I think all of history would be like, God, he makes a good point. Like of all the people that God should let off the hook, why doesn't he let Moses off the hook? And you would think that maybe he said that early on. He said that at the river when it happened or at the rock when it happened. But then eventually over time, it would wear off and he'd be like, all right, Moses, you're fine. Like you've lived a good life. You can still enter into the promised land. Like you'd think he'd let him off the hook, but that's not what he does. Look at the beginning of 34. This is the tragic story of the enforcement of that penalty. Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land. Now these words you're about to hear and read are, these are the tribes of Israel. These are, this is the territories of the different tribes. This is like someone taking us up on a mountain, God taking us up on a mountain and saying, that's where North Carolina is going to be. and that's where Virginia is going to be, and that's where South Carolina is going to be, and that's where Tennessee is going to be. That's what that means. So he says this. The Lord showed him the whole land, from Gilead to Dan, all of Naphtali, the territory of Eph He said to I'm not going to let you in. And then he didn't. He took him up like he said he would. And he said, I wanted your eyes to see it. This is what it is. This is what I promised on oath to your forefathers. This is where you've been leading my people. And I know that you thought you were going to lead the procession in. But I'm only going to let your eyes see it. I'm not going to let your feet touch it. And so I've struggled with what to do with this story. Because it seems out of sync with the character of God. But I do think that here's one of the things that we can take from this story. And it's a very simple thing, but it's true, and it's not something we like to confront very often. But the reality is actions have consequences, both natural and punitive. The things that we do have consequences. Both natural and punitive. And so when we commit a sin, when we make a choice, those choices have consequences. And that doesn't go away because we're thousands of years removed from this. It didn't go away when God applied the law to his people and said, if you were guilty at one point, you were guilty of all, which Moses did. You're guilty at one point, so you are condemned. That was the deal. It's a picture of why we need salvation, because we are guilty in at least one point. And that's why we can't get into the promised land by ourselves, because we have sin in our past. But that sin and those actions have consequences. And we don't like to think about that, and we don't like to deal with that. And I think sometimes we have an attitude of, yes, I've done this, but God, if you would please expunge the consequences from my future, that would be great. But the truth is that our actions have consequences. And those consequences are both natural and punitive. And if you're a parent, you understand what that means. This makes sense to you intuitively. When you're a parent and you're guiding your children to become who they need to become, who God created them to be, you have to either allow consequences or you have to apply consequences. Sometimes you watch your children or your child doing something and you know they're cruising for a bruising, right? You know this is going to end poorly. But you think that the best way to love them as a parent is just to let it play out and let them learn from their own consequences. One of my favorite things about grace is that every Sunday, all the little kids are running around the room and I think it's great. And it brings life and vibrancy to the church. And I don't mind that they bang into the wall. And sometimes we'll somebody, we have a kid one time that just took a marker and ran down that whole wall. Just the whole, just, they just, we needed a racing stripe. Okay. Um, I don't mind that. And they knock over people's coffee. They bump into us out there. I don't care. I think it's, I think it's fun. And one day I was in here and my son, John is four. And he was over in this corner and I was standing up there next to the doors. And I looked over and he was running up to a child that was sizably larger than him. And John likes to hit right now. He just, and he hits like that. And so he ran up to this kid and just hit him in the back. And instead of running over and grabbing him and say, we don't hit, you know, I thought, let's just see how this plays out. And the kid turned around and was mad and hit John back and knocked him on his butt and made him cry. And John came running to me. Daddy, so-and-so hit me. I said, yeah, I saw. This should teach us not to hit people that are bigger than us. Don't do that. Don't do that, son. You see me? I've never picked a fight in my life. You know why? Because I don't like to cry in front of other people. And so I could have run up and I could have stopped and not let the other kid hit my son. But I thought the best thing to do was just to let the consequences play out. And so sometimes we watch our kid cruising for a bruising and when they fall on their rear end, we pick them up and we go, yeah, don't do that again. The reason you're in pain now is because your actions chose it. Our actions have consequences. Other times as parents, we need to make the consequences punitive, don't we? We need to punish, to teach a lesson so that they don't do that again, to help them remember that that's not the way they're supposed to act or behave or the attitude that they're supposed to have. In our house, screen time's a big deal. You bring up screen time and there's tears right away before you even say how much screen time is going to be lost. And some actions require a punitive consequence. When they get older, you take the car keys or whatever it is. But as parents, we understand these things. That when we're in charge of a child and we're in charge of raising them, it is absolutely irresponsible to try to raise them in an environment in which their actions do not have consequences. It is completely unhelpful for life. And in understanding this principle, we understand that this is what good parents do. And so the other thing is, this story reminds us that God is our father and we are his children. God is our father and we are his children. God is the father of Moses and of the Hebrew people. And when Moses, one of his sons, sinned, God had to apply a punitive consequence. It was not a natural consequence that Moses experienced. By all accounts, he could have gotten there and gone across the river. But God applied this punitive consequence for this action to correct it. And to set an example for the rest of his children that no one gets off the hook. God is a fair God. But because God is our Father, he must also, as he looks down on us as his children, apply to us both natural and punitive consequences. God cannot run over and protect us from the larger child when we choose to take an action that we shouldn't. He's not going to do that. He will allow us to experience natural consequences of our choices. If we choose, and I know this from experience and unanswered prayers, if we choose to eat like a garbage can and avoid exercise for a couple of decades, we're going to end up in poor health. And we can't just pray that God will make us magically healthy. These are consequences of our actions. If we volunteer for everything and we say yes for everything and we overextend and we can't say no to anyone and we end up stressed and exhausted, that's not God punishing you. That's the natural consequence of your actions and your choices. But sometimes we like to blame God for things that we brought on ourselves. I remember at my last church, this was easily over a decade ago, and my last church, it was a larger church, it was about 2,000 people, and I was on staff. I was a staff pastor. And if you called the church and you said, I need to talk to a pastor, they funneled that call to me, which makes total sense because I ooze tenderness. And so I took a call this one day. I don't know why y'all are laughing so hard at that. Jeepers. It's a little funny. I didn't know it was that funny. I take a call one day from this guy, and it's like early 30s. And he says, hey, I just need to talk with a pastor. I just got something going on in my life. I just can't make sense of it. I was like, all right, what's going on, man? And he says, well, because I got this girlfriend that I really love. I'm like, well, that's good. And he goes, yeah, but I've also got some problems with drug addiction, and I'm kind of in and out, and it's a real struggle for me. And a few months ago, she gave me an ultimatum. She was like, you know, clean up or I'm out of here. And he goes, and I just messed up a couple more times, and she left me. And I'm devastated. And this is the kicker. I just don't know why God would allow this to happen to me. What? And I was nice. I didn't just be like, you're dumb and hang on the phone. But I tried to say, like, our actions have consequences. But I think a lot of times in life, something difficult will happen to us. And sometimes we can throw ourselves a pity party and we can think, why did God allow this to happen to me? Why did God make this happen to me? Why did God allow this to happen to me? And if we look, it's like, well, you took some steps to lead to this consequence. God didn't allow that business deal to go bad. It was a bad business deal. God didn't allow you to lose your job. You just underperformed for a few months or years and your boss got sick of it. Like sometimes there's natural consequences in life. Other times God does bring, we see in scripture, punitive action into our lives to correct our behavior and direct us to the right place. We know this is true because not only do we see it in the life of Moses, but we also see it in the life of David. When David, the second king of Israel, you may have heard of him. He's a pretty big deal. He got towards the end of his life. And in 2 Samuel chapter 16 and 17, David has this conversation with God. And he says, he says, Father, I want to build your temple. You'll remember from the story of Moses that God instructed them to build a tabernacle, which was a fancy tent with a big square tent in the middle. And the Holy of Holies was half of that tent. And that was where the presence of God rested. And it was built to be nomadic, to be able to take it up, move it, and set it back up. That was the job of the Levites, setting up the tabernacle, taking down the tabernacle, moving the tabernacle, setting up the tabernacle. That's what the Levites did. And so when they finally got into Israel, into their promised land, into Jerusalem, and David's sitting on the throne. He says, Father, I want to build you a permanent home. And God says, David, I can't let you do that. There's too much blood on your hands. That's a punitive consequence. I can't tell you exactly what sins are involved in too much blood on your hands, but David did a lot of killing. And if you read between the lines, he did a lot of sinning. And so God said, no, you're not the one to do this. You haven't lived the life of the person that I want to allow to do this. So you can't do it. That's a punitive consequence. And we know it's punitive because before he died, he gathered all the materials, everything that was needed, all the cedars of Lebanon and all the rocks from the quarry were put on the job site so that when the next king became king, he could say go and he could have the honor of building the temple. So by all accounts, he could have built it by the end of his life. This was not a natural consequence of his actions. This was punitive by God. The biggest result or example we see in Scripture of someone suffering a punitive consequence is that. It's Jesus on the cross. He was being punished. He was being punished as a consequence of our actions, of your actions. That's a punishment that we deserve. That's a punitive consequence that should have been laid on us, death. But God chose instead to punish not his children, but his child. Do you see? So we know in scripture that God exacts punitive punishments for consequences of our actions. Now, I don't know how to tell you how to parse out what in your life is a punishment and what is a natural consequence. I really don't know how to tell you to do that. I thought about it this week and I'm like, I'm not even going there. I don't know how to tell you to do it. I just know that both are true. But that far more often than not, the hard things that we are experiencing are natural consequences of our actions. And so we see in the story that our actions have consequences. Our sin has consequences. And it makes me wonder, I wonder what our sin has prevented us from. I wonder what our sin has prevented us from experiencing or doing. In the example of Moses and David, Moses, God took an opportunity from him. You will not enter the promised land. David, God took an opportunity from him. You're not going to be the one that builds the temple. The opportunity, the thing that Jesus had to give up is staying in his perfect divine form forever. He had to take on human form. He had to condescend to become flesh. And so if that's what happens with sin in the Bible is opportunities are removed from us. God's going to use us in smaller ways or in different ways. I wonder what I've missed out on because of my sin. I wonder what opportunities I've squandered because of the way I've chosen to behave and exercise my faith for the last decade. I wonder if you think it might be possible that you've missed some opportunities in your life because of some actions that you've taken in the past. And I don't know that God is ever going to take any of us up on a mountain and go, do you see what you missed? But maybe it'll happen in heaven, I'm not sure. But it makes me wonder, the story makes me wonder, what opportunities am I missing out on because of the actions that I've taken in the past? But here's the thing I love about this story that dawned on me this week as I sat with it and for the past couple of weeks. This isn't just a story about punishment. This isn't just a story about consequences. This is also a story about comfort. Let me show you. In a second, we're going to look at verse 5 in Deuteronomy 34. You'll remember the first four verses are God taking him up and going, this is the land of Gad, and this is the land of Naphtali, and this is the land of Ephraim, and this is the land that I swore on oath to Abraham.? I'm going to let you see it with your eyes. You cannot touch it with your feet. But then he takes him. He's the only person I'm aware of that died in the presence of God. And he's the only person in scripture that's buried by God himself in a secret grave that no one has ever found. And so what we see is that we have this God of consequences, but we have a God of comfort. And so in this passage, what I see is God holding consequences necessarily in one hand, because if he doesn't, he's not a loving father. But in the other hand, he holds comfort. And as he's exacting consequences on Moses with one hand, he's immediately comforting him with the other. I think that's amazing. So because he loves us, he holds consequence in one hand and comfort in the other. This is true of the story of David too. This is true of the story of David. When he says, David, no, you cannot build my temple. There's too much blood on your hands. The immediate thing coming after that, in the passage, the immediate thing that God says is, but I will allow your son Solomon to build it. And my son, the Messiah, will sit on your throne for all of eternity. Consequence, you can't build the temple. Comfort, here's what I can promise you. That's the passage that becomes the Davidic covenant. Consequence in one hand, comfort in the other. Now here's what's really cool. I told you the example of Jesus being punished for us. Consequence in one hand. But Jesus, but that's our punishment. Those are our consequences that he's holding. But in Jesus, we also find our ultimate comfort, right? We also find our ultimate comfort in Christ because on the cross, death was defeated. I did a funeral the other day and I got to say, as you get to say at funerals of people who believe in Jesus, this is not goodbye. This is goodbye for now. There's hope here. We know where she is. We know she's looking down on us. We know she loves us and that she's seen the face of her Savior and that we should be jealous of her and where she is. So on the cross, death lost its sting and sin lost its chains. And so it is the source of the greatest comfort for anyone in the gospel. That because of our actions, we deserve profound consequences. And whether they seem disproportionate to us or not, Jesus paid for those. And in that payment, he also becomes our comfort. And so God doesn't have to say, this is going to happen, but this is going to happen. He says this is happening. This, to me, is what the story of the death of Moses is about. I've told you repeatedly, everything points to Jesus. And I believe that this story points to the gospel in multiple and profound ways. And I want us to remember as we go, whenever we are experiencing consequences, whenever we feel like life is hard, life is dark, like life is deep, in our darkest days where our sin is so great that we feel we can't move. And I've had those days when I was so wracked with guilt for my sin and my choices that I felt ashamed of who I was and I didn't want anyone to know and I didn't want to look anybody in the eye. When we have those days and we are experiencing the consequences of our actions, we can always, always, always look to the cross and be comforted that God still loves us, that he covered this too, and one day we will be in eternity with him. Whenever we experience consequences, we are also offered comfort. Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a good father. It may be odd to pray and scary to say, but thank you for consequences. Thank you for the things that direct us. God, I pray that in our lives, when hard things are happening, that we wouldn't immediately blame them on you, but we would stop and assess ourselves and say, well, maybe this is my fault. God, if there are instances where we do think maybe we're being punished, God, I pray that we would trust you in that punishment and that we would remember in Hebrews that we're told that the Lord disciplines the ones he loves. We're so grateful that you're a good father. We're so grateful that every story can be woven in such a way that what we find is it's really pointing us towards your son and your love for us. Thank you for loving Moses the way you did, and thank you for loving us the way you do. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.